Martin Amis | ukwatch.net

Islamophobia: a New Strain of Bigotry

Ellie Keen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:35:45 +0000

Attacks on Muslims by politicians and the media have been on the rise since the 9/11 attacks. Now, when author Martin Amis’s abusive tirades against Islam are broadcast and published without qualm, Hassan Mahamdallie asks if Islamophobia has become society’s acceptable racism.

The new imperialist era that Western leaders have embarked upon, and its repercussions, have wrought extraordinary transformations on sections of the intelligentsia. Take the example of Martin Amis. Since the 9/11 attacks the once voguish novelist, author of books including London Fields, has been steadily building up a body of work that has essentially argued that Islamism is the new fascist threat akin to Hitler’s regime. He argues that this threat demands extraordinary measures up to and including war, that Islam itself has become dominated by a death cult, and that the flaccid multicultural values of the liberal left in Western societies have made us soft and open to attack.

Martin Amis said in an interview with the New York Times that he was not Islamophobic but “Islamismphobic” – that is opposed to militant Islam – but this has taken him into that dark territory populated by anti-Muslim bigots, imperialist warmongers and apocalyptic right wingers who believe that the Muslim world is the greatest threat to civilisation.

Notoriously, Amis embarked on a “thought experiment”, as his supporters would later have it, in an interview with the Times in September 2006. Amis mused, “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

“They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.”

In the same interview the author also warned, “They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.”

The Marxist philosopher Terry Eagleton took Martin Amis to task. Eagleton lectures, as does Amis, at the University of Manchester School of Arts. Eagleton reasonably pointed out, “Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent.”

Eagleton’s observations made him the target of Amis’s supporters, who bandied about the accusation that Marxists like Eagleton supported Islamist acts of terror. To this slur Eagleton retorted, “Blowing the heads off little children in the name of Allah was not exactly what Marx had in mind. Amis’s panic-stricken reaction to 9/11 is part of a wider hysteria that has swept over sections of the liberal left, one to which creative writers seem particularly prone.”

The controversy rumbled on. Then, in November of last year, one of Amis’s contemporaries, Ronan Bennett, wrote the article “Shame On Us” in which he took Amis to task. Bennett’s well-argued Guardian article concluded, “Amis got away with it. He got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.”

Bennett’s article, precisely because it was so powerful and forensic, raised howls of protest from Amis’s supporters, who had been attempting to cast Amis in the public imagination as a brave, transgressive figure, who refused to be victimised by “the PC Brigade”. For them Amis, for “telling it like it is” about the Islamist/Muslim danger embodied the finest features of the Western Enlightenment.

Christopher Hitchens, who completed his journey to the right when he backed George Bush and Tony Blair in their war on Iraq, jumped to defend his friend. Hitchens replied to Bennett that Amis was being satirical in the tradition of Jonathan Swift when he had embarked on his “experiment in the limits of permissible thought”. But what does this explain? Nothing at all.

Enlightenment values?

Is Hitchens really arguing that the act of making your foul and innermost prejudices public is a brave and progressive act in and of itself? Are we now to congratulate every fascist that crawls out of the woodwork to make speeches inciting attacks on Muslims (or Jews) as a brave “thought experimenter”? What precisely is the Enlightenment value at stake here?

It is revealing that, in his defence of Amis, Hitchens also argues that anti-Muslim racism is not the same as other racisms, because Muslims do not constitute a “race”.

Hitchens should know that the vast majority of Muslims in this country are from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East or Africa. That is how they enter the racist paradigm. In the 1970s I was chased down the road by skinheads shouting “Paki”. Now I could be jumped by some BNP thugs shouting, “Fucking Muslim terrorist!” The kicks and punches would feel exactly the same, whatever the racially-inspired epithet attached to them. However, the defence that “I am attacking a religion, not a race,” is the “defence” favoured by the BNP, by which the fascist organisation exploits a loophole in our anti-discrimination laws.

The novelist Ian McEwan, whose clincher was, “I’ve known Martin Amis for almost 35 years, and he’s no racist,” also made a virtue out of the act of attacking “mainstream” Islam. For him this was “not to be racist, but to exercise the gift of consciousness and the privilege of liberty”. The implication seems to be that novelists can say and write what odious rubbish they like and we have to accept it. The Enlightenment figure Voltaire never said he was beyond criticism – in fact he engaged in furious debates, usually with people in power.

Amis was unrepentant, of course. He replied to Bennett, “As a multiculturalist ideologue, Bennett cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every 35 years, and b) this entails certain consequences.”

Amis is not an isolated aberration. As Terry Eagleton points out, he is only one of a host of powerfully placed commentators, many ex-left, across Europe and the US who have created this nightmarish vision of ever encroaching “Islamofascism” (although not a phrase Amis uses) as a stick to beat Muslims and those who seek to defend them with, and as an ideological cover for imperialism.

One of the striking features of Amis’s recent writings is the closed nature of his literary imagination. You would think that an intellectual and novelist would be inquiring about their subject, that they would have a passion for accuracy and an essential truth, or perhaps some empathy or understanding. None of this is present in Amis’s work. His mind is shut. Islamists, Al Qaida operatives, busily breeding Muslims, all are crudely one-dimensional.

So the vision that he constructs from this bundle of inaccuracies, misreading of the Quran, generalisations and caricatures has no real purchase. It only appeals, if at all, to blind prejudices (if the reader is that way inclined). For Amis the world changed on 9/11. “September 11 has given us a planet we barely recognise.” He cannot see that the terrorist attacks on the West are a shard of a nightmare that the great powers have visited on the populations of the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere through colonisation, imperialism and their attendant slaughter and immiseration on a vast scale.

So when Amis talks of Abu Ghraib, he sees it as a “shameful deviation” – not a manifestation of a wider abuse of the Iraqi population occupied by violent forces that act as a law unto themselves. It is the West’s loss of “moral advantage” at Abu Ghraib according to Amis. What moral advantage did it have before Abu Ghraib? This inability to recognise that the people of the Middle East may view the impact of imperialism and “modernity” somewhat differently than Amis does from his comfy perch betrays a certain ruthless arrogance.

It is also very difficult to see what is progressive and brave in continually turning the heat on oppressed minority populations in Europe. As Gary Younge wrote, “The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects, but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim, they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb – it is simply suffering from one of the oldest viruses harboured among its most established populations.”

One almost wishes that Amis and his ilk take a deeper look at their Enlightenment heroes whose names they like to wave at their critics.

Edward Gibbon wrote the classic Enlightenment text The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes from 1776 to 1788). He included in his study an extensive chapter on the prophet Muhammad and the early development of Islam. Gibbon held Muhammad’s achievements in the highest regard. He could also admire the unifying nature and attendant philosophical leap that Islam represented at the time.

Compare Gibbon with the casual abuse of Amis, who wrote of the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, “[He]...spent his childhood memorising the Quran. He was ten by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him: and so it proves.”

The great French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire was not anti-religion. He is probably best described as a deist who believed in a god out of reason and not faith. What he detested was the abuse of power of the establishment and the established church in France at the time – the Roman Catholic church, and its oppressive nature. Indeed Voltaire spent much of his later life defending oppressed people who practised minority religions (Protestants) against heinous injustices meted out by the state and the religious hierarchy.

Voltaire’s most famous campaign in favour of the oppressed was in defence of Jean Calas, a Protestant cloth merchant from Toulouse. In 1761 Calas was wrongly accused of murdering his own son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. There was not a shred of evidence against Calas, but he was nevertheless condemned to death, broken on the wheel, strangled and his body burnt. Voltaire was appalled, and furiously campaigned for a posthumous pardon for Calas.

Voltaire published his famous broadside, A Treatise on Tolerance, in support of Calas and wrote to a friend saying, “I am beside myself. I am concerned as a man, and a bit also as a philosopher. What I want to know is, on which side is the horror of fanaticism?”

The Amis-Eagleton controversy: The British literary elite and the “war on terror”

JamieSW — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:25:26 +0000

The novelist Martin Amis appeared in the Guardian on Saturday to rebut the charge of racism that novelist and screen writer Ronan Bennett levelled against him the previous week in the same paper. Amis denied being a racist, professed himself disgusted by Islamophobia and praised the “beautiful reality” of Britain’s multi-racial society.

Amis then makes a switchback twist and declares that the issue is not one of racism, but ideology. In a liberal democracy, he argues, creed or colour does not matter unless some of its citizens believe in Sharia or the Caliphate or carry out acts of terrorism. Then, he declares, “numbers start to matter.”

Amis then proceeds to claim that the indigenous populations of Italy and Spain are set to halve over the next 35 years and that “this entails certain consequences.”

His remarks have a definite historical resonance—one with a far longer and even more sinister pedigree than when Margaret Thatcher said that Britain was being “swamped by an alien culture” in 1979.

Amis’s Guardian article was the latest salvo in a dispute that began after literary theorist Professor Terry Eagleton of the University of Manchester took issue with remarks Amis made in an interview in the Times last year. Shortly after the transatlantic terror alert of that year, Amis was reported to have said:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?” (Interview with Ginny Dougary, Times, September 9, 2006)

Eagleton likened these remarks to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” located them in the context of the “War on Terror” and grouped Amis with other liberals and one-time leftist intellectuals who have moved sharply to the right. One year on, and only after being challenged by Eagleton, Amis claims to have been misquoted. His denial carries little weight. If Dougary did so, then Amis has had plenty of time to demand a correction, but he did not. Moreover, his reported remarks are perfectly consistent with his written remarks on the subject.

Eagleton even made the error of ascribing the offending passage to an essay by Amis published at the same time as the interview. His elementary mistake only serves to underline the symmetry of views expressed in the Times interview and the 12,000 word essay, “The Age of Horrorism,” published in the Observer.

In it Amis wrote, “Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it.”

As far as Amis is concerned there is a clash of civilisations in which the enemy camp consists of all Moslems, who are equally tainted by the suicide bombings of Al Qaeda. They bear, according to Amis’s disjointed logic, a collective guilt for the crimes of their co-religionists.

He even reveals the context that gave rise to the words attributed to him in the Times, describing how he was held up at airport security for half an hour while his six-year-old daughter’s hand luggage was searched. He writes, “I wanted to say something like, ‘Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East.’”

Amis has insisted that there is a clear distinction between Islamophobia and his own anti-Islamism, as there is also a distinction between Islam and Islamism. But his writings make clear he does not believe that such a distinction counts for very much in practice. Rather “The Age of Horrorism” offers a series of sweeping and entirely unfounded judgements about Islam in general.

He writes of “the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” which, he claims, was so resistant to Western influence that it refused to employ the wheel. This assertion is so bizarre that it ranks with the claims that the Nazis made about the Jews. The only Western influences to which the Islamic world was open, he then asserts, were those of Hitler and Stalin.

It would be painful to list the outstanding figures from Moslem backgrounds that have made contributions to world culture in answer to this filth. Nor would it be appropriate to refer to the many professionals on whom we rely for health care, legal advice and education to counter Amis’s assertions. And the caring neighbours, school friends and colleagues certainly have no place here.

Christopher Hitchens defended Amis by comparing him to Jonathan Swift and arguing that “the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought.”

There is a truth to this assertion. But while Swift was testing the limits imposed on progressive thought by the conservative establishment, Amis is testing the limits once imposed on reactionary declamations within an academic and literary milieu previously known for its progressive liberalism. His interviews, essays and articles are pushing at the limits of a democratic ideology that has been shaped by the experience of the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century.

His methods and those of his supporters exemplify the cowardly way that large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia are making make their peace with the right. At one moment they lash out with a racist statement, the next they back off denying they ever said it, until emboldened by the support of their peers they attempt another attack. Feeling their way and testing all the time just how far they will be permitted to go, they move inexorably to the right.

The publication of “The Age of Horrorism” by the Observer is not the first time that this nominally liberal newspaper—and its week-day sister publication, the Guardian—has sought to legitimise the anti-democratic measures introduced by the Labour government by whipping up Islamophobia and fears over immigration. We can trace this editorial policy back to the Guardian’s publication of a three-part essay by David Goodhart, which claimed that the welfare state was untenable in an ethnically mixed society with a large immigrant population. The extent to which both publications speak for a social layer was evident from the fact that no prominent figure criticised Amis when his remarks were first published.

It was only once Eagleton had the courage to break ranks that it became difficult for journalists who had remained silent to any longer avoid commenting on his racist views. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the Independent, categorized Amis as one “with the beasts pounding the back door, the Muslim-baiters and haters,” making the observation that such figures “these days are as likely to come from the Groucho and Garrick clubs as the nasty, secret venues used by Neo Fascists.”

The Groucho club is associated with the media and the Garrick club with the dramatic arts.

Equally tellingly, Amis responded with an attempt to invoke social solidarity, noting that only last summer, long after his remarks were published, he and Alibhai-Brown had enjoyed drinks together at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Amis and Alibhai-Brown began their careers on the New Statesman. Amis has gone from being the cynical young man playing with left-wing ideas we see in his autobiographical Experience—when he liked to refer to the family home as the “fascist mansion”—to a man of the right. It is a journey that his friend from the New Statesman days Christopher Hitchens has also made.

Alibhai-Brown’s admission that Amis’s views are prevalent amongst the British literary elite is an important one. Always a privileged group, members of the literati were once marked out by their educational and cultural attributes rather than their wealth. But increasingly its representatives have been drawn into the orbit of, or even absorbed into, the plutocratic layer that has benefited from the plundering of the welfare state and the pillaging of the world’s resources by a renewed wave of imperialism. Vast sums of money have accumulated in the hands of a tiny oligarchy, which now sets the standards for the rest of society. The measure of intellectual and literary success has become the extent to which writers and intellectuals can be distinguished from the mass of the population by their bank accounts and real estate portfolios. Amis’s hate-filled essay expresses the deepest social interests of this group, because it gives voice to the sharpening class polarisation that has taken place on a global scale.

To call the literary princeling Amis a racist as Eagleton did is regarded by his peers as tantamount to an act of lèse majesté. In lining up to defend him, the literary elite were revealing their own social and, let us be frank, economic interests. That was clear from the rapidity with which the controversy focused on an attack on Eagleton for breaking ranks and on the question of Marxism. John Sutherland, professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, denounced Eagleton for making a public stand against his fellow Manchester University lecturer Amis—who Sutherland insisted might threaten Amis’s career—so that he could sell more copies of “a Marxist primer” that was “arguably, outdated.”

Michael Henderson in the Daily Telegraph wrote, “Neither Amis, nor anybody else, needs lectures on tolerance from old-style Marxists.” In the Observer, Jasper Gerrard wrote, “Quite why we still employ academics whose main qualification is their Marxism is a mystery.”

Amis himself condemned Eagleton in the Financial Times as “a marooned ideologue who can’t get out of bed in the morning without guidance from God and Karl Marx. This makes him very unstaunch in the struggle against Islamism because part of him is a believer.”

Here we see something of the deeper significance of this dispute. It is an attack on the accumulated social consciousness of centuries that have been illuminated by the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment and which culminated in Marxism and the great struggles of the working class for social equality. Amis and his defenders are guilty of an attempt to eradicate all that is humane and progressive in the Western intellectual tradition so that an eviscerated caricature can be held up as something that must be defended—by force if necessary—against the barbarism that supposedly emanates from the East and is embodied in Islamism.

Eagleton is no Marxist, but the fact that he refers favourably to Marx in his lectures and books is enough to condemn him in the eyes of Amis and his friends. The campaign they have launched is a considered attempt to outlaw Marxism and all progressive thought from the universities and wider intellectual circles. An association with Marxism, it appears, renders an internationally known academic unsuitable for employment in a university. Hence Sutherland closing his October 4 comment in the Guardian by asking, “Is Eagleton too big a beast on campus to be reprimanded for uncollegial conduct—if that is felt necessary by the university authorities? Or perhaps they agree with their professor of cultural theory.”

In giving Eagleton a kicking, the British literary elite are sending a message to younger and less well-established academics, to aspiring writers and to students that Marxism is not acceptable and that they had better adopt the same degenerate stance as Amis if they expect to be published, get promoted or be awarded any grade above a gamma minus.

The full extent of Amis’s project is clear when one considers the trajectory of his development from his days as literary editor of the reformist New Statesman to the publication of Koba the Dread in 2002. Koba purported to be an examination of the phenomenon of Stalinism.

There is a place for the skills of a novelist in such a project. It might even be argued that only novelists can provide us with the textural quality of history and that their work is as necessary as that of the historian to our understanding of the past. The ability of the novelist to reveal the emotional content of social relations is a skill particular to their craft that depends upon the development of their own subjective faculties and the linguistic technique with which to express their vision. That subjectivity which is so essential to their work demands, however, a basis in objectivity. A novel without that objective basis provides a display of technique alone. It may flash before us the images of a lurid fantasy, but the emotional response it elicits is akin to the way a commercial disturbs our emotions in order to deflect our critical faculties.

Koba has all the appearance of an adolescent, ill-informed, derivative and emotionally immature work although it is written by a man nearer 60 than 16. The appearance does not lie. In essence that is what the book is. Yet those negative qualities have been harnessed in a project as sophisticated as a piece of advertising. The product that Amis is selling us is the conception that Stalinism was the inevitable and necessary outcome of Marxism, that Stalin was the heir of Lenin and Trotsky and that the Soviet Union was the equivalent of Nazi Germany.

The aim of culture is to raise us to a truly human level, but a novel without objectivity degrades our humanity. Amis devotes page after page to the accounts of survivors of Stalin’s terror, to descriptions of the interrogations, the tortures and the camps. Yet there is no light of humanity in his account. He examines the monstrous crimes of Stalinism as though he were poking a dead cat with a stick. We emerge from the experience of reading with no sense of why these horrors happened or how they might have been prevented. Lenin and Trotsky, we are told, created a police state for Stalin’s use. But if that was the case, why was it necessary for Stalin to murder Trotsky and any one associated with him?

Trotsky, despite the title of the book which would lead a reader to suppose that it was about Stalin, emerges as the real subject of the Koba the Dread. Amis cannot help himself spitting venom on the page every time he writes the name. “Trotsky was never a contender for the leadership,” he writes. “In that struggle he was a mere poseur (reading French novels during meetings of the Central Committee): a Congress election result of 1921 put Trotsky tenth (and he didn’t come tenth because he was more humane). More basically Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer—they all were.”

Amis has asserted that the British left’s “rampant” affinity with Hezbollah and hostility to Israel is the only real expression of racism—Anti-Semitism. It is revealing then that when he discusses the murder of Trotsky and his family he cannot prevent himself from using the name Bronstein—A name that Trotsky never used and by which his children, who took their mother’s name, were never known, but which was assiduously promulgated by Stalin when he wanted to cultivate an anti-Semitic hatred of Trotsky. Amis unwittingly reveals that at the heart of the Zionism he has espoused sits a deep revulsion towards a particular layer of Jewish intellectuals and workers whose cultivated and progressive ideas both Stalin and Hitler wanted to eradicate from the heart of European culture.

For Amis, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But whereas he has an aesthetic aversion to Bush, he dreads an American defeat. He fears that the “coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.” His fear makes him willing to sign up for the war against terror and urges him to recruit others to the cause. His books draw on the ideologues of neo-conservatism and White House advisers such as Bernard Lewis. Transmuted through his books, views that would be abhorrent to Guardian readers are repackaged to become acceptable in literary circles that would despise Bush and his Christian fundamentalism.

Amis is one of the darlings of the British literary establishment, rarely out of the quality papers since he published his first novel at the age of 24 and long expected to fulfil the literary promise expected of Kingsley Amis’s son. His prominence has made him a suitable figure to engineer a shift in the social consciousness of wider layers of educated people who look to novelists and journalists as a source of cultural guidance. We are witnessing a concerted effort to make the “War on Terror” respectable and to create an acceptable face for neo-imperialism in the Middle East.

Liberalism in 'Londonistan'

JamieSW — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:26:10 +0000

Much has been heard from Britain’s political class in recent years about the role of “values” in the fight against terrorism. The problem, we are told, is that the Muslim community in the UK is failing to integrate with British society and accept our nation’s intrinsic liberalism.

The message has been imparted to us in several ways. According to a recent study, over 90 per cent of the articles referring to Muslims or Islam in British newspapers on a typical week presented the religion and its adherents in a negative light. The picture presented by the media was of a strict and irreconcilable dichotomy between Islam and British “values”, with the former posing a serious threat to the latter. (1)

The “emotive…abusive” language identified by the report has by no means been the sole preserve of the press. No less a figure than world renowned British author Martin Amis recently spoke of the demographic threat of being “outnumbered” by Muslims; of the need for the Islamic community “to suffer until it gets its house in order” through perhaps “strip-searching…..discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children”. The response from the political class to Amis’ naked, virulent racism has been near total silence. (2)

In this febrile atmosphere, there can be little doubt about which prejudice Gordon Brown was nodding knowingly towards when he told the Labour Party conference last year: “I believe … that we the British people must be far more explicit about the common ground on which we stand, the shared values which bring us together, the habits of citizenship around which we can and must unite. Expect all who are in our country to play by our rules.” (3)

One reads countless complaints in the British press about the fearsome dominion of a left-wing, minority-favouring “political correctness” that stifles free debate. Yet it does appear that, in respect of this one minority at least, the political class feels a remarkable degree of freedom to say exactly what it pleases.

There is of course much benefit to be gained from the demonisation of Muslims. Powerful people throughout history have recognised the value of stigmatising, or “othering”, a given minority. In addition, there is an immediate need to portray the current terrorist threat as stemming from the deviant pathologies of a backward Muslim culture. This diverts attention from the broad consensus among security experts that the threat in fact stems from, and is being escalated by, the government’s foreign policies. (4)

However, self-serving narratives constructed by the powers-that-be do not always sit well with the empirical evidence. According to a recent poll, 96 per cent of London’s Muslims, along with 97 per cent of Londoners as a whole, “think that everyone should respect the law in Britain”; 89 per cent of Muslims and 88 per cent of all Londoners “believe that everyone in Britain should be free to live their lives as they want so long as they do not prevent others from doing the same”; 94 per cent of Muslims and 92 per cent of all Londoners “believe that everyone in Britain should have equal opportunities”; 95 per cent of Muslims and 86 per cent of all Londoners “think everyone should be free to practise their religion openly”; and 86 per cent of Muslims and 91 per cent of all Londoners “also think it is important that the Metropolitan Police work closely with communities such as the Muslim community to deter terrorist attacks”. These results, like those of any opinion poll, should be approached with caution. But if accurate, they indicate that liberty and security are highly valued by both Muslim and non-Muslim Londoners alike. (5)

One wonders how the highly-developed rationality of Amis and other self-styled “Enlightenment liberal” critics of “Islamofascism” will compute this latest piece of empirical data. Might they be moved to consider the possibility that liberal values are human values – not to be claimed as Western or British? Might they acknowledge that liberty has found expression (and found enemies) in both Western and Eastern history, and that no culture has monopoly ownership of either tyranny or freedom even in the present day?

The various peddlers of Islamophobia present us with a clear dichotomy. On the one hand we have the West; steeped in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophy, which values personal freedom and cool rationality based on empirical fact. On the other hand, facing the rational, liberal West, stands an unreasoning, fanatical Islam bent on its destruction.

Yet, while Islam no doubt has its own characteristics, a Muslim cannot simply be thrown into the box marked “illiberal” without considering not only what kind of a Muslim that person might be, but also what other facets – gender, nationality, economic circumstances, and so on – may contribute to their individual make-up and political outlook. Any rational assessment reveals that identity is far more fluid and complex than is allowed for by the simplistic binaries of the “clash of civilisations”. Our political class would do well to remember this if it really wishes to honour the Enlightenment values that it loudly claims to uphold.

David Wearing writes for Le Monde Diplomatique and UK Watch. His website is www.democratsdiary.co.uk

References

(1) “The search for common ground: Muslims, non-Muslims and the UK media”, Greater London Authority, London, November 2007.

(2) “Shame On Us”, The Guardian, 19 November 2007

(3) Speech to Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown, 25 September 2006

(4) “Ignoring the Intelligence: How New Labour Helped Bring Terror to London“, David Wearing, www.democratsdiary.co.uk, 22 July 2005

(5) “GLA telephone survey of Londoners with Muslim booster”, Greater London Authority, London, November 2007

The absurd world of Martin Amis

JamieSW — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:27:52 +0000

Look, I’m busy. I’m writing a script and I won’t be disturbed. Except that because I’m writing about terrorism and Islam, I keep being distracted by Martin Amis. He prowls the thickets of my research like a demented flasher. Sometimes Christopher Hitchens pops up, too, and flashes along with his friend. They rail against Muslims. They’re obviously daft. But people take them seriously.

No matter that they act like senile 12-year-olds on the Today programme website – smoking illegal fags to look tough and cool. No matter that Amis coins truly abominable terms like ‘the age of horrorism’ and when criticised tells people to ‘fuck off’. Surely we all chuckle at the strenuous ennui of his salon drawl. Didn’t he once accidentally sneer his face off? His ‘insight’ about Mohammed Atta involved pretending the hijacker was constipated for six months – brilliantly smuggling into our subconscious that idea that Atta was ‘full of shit’. He abandoned his satire on terrorism in which a Muslim unleashes mass rape on America because ‘faced with Islamism, even satire withers and dies’, not because his idea was obviously rubbish.

Despite his manifest absurdity (he called the World Trade Centre attacks ‘edificide’ and the towers’ destruction an ‘apocollapse’), people take him seriously and if they do then we must.

Last week Amis was called a racist. I saw him speak at the ICA last month. Was his negativity about Islam technically racist? I don’t know. What I can tell you is that Martin Amis is the new Abu Hamza.

To recap, Amis was called a racist because he said Muslims were backward, violent, homophobic, paranoid, boring, retarded and stupid. Hitchens said no, he’s conducting a ‘thought experiment’.

Now Amis should be allowed to wonder aloud about anything. He can suggest Muslims should ‘experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children’ if he likes. Thought experiments are fine. But if he bundles his thoughts on Islam together and iterates them one after the other as he did when I saw him, he displays not unguarded musing but the forging of an incoherent creed of hate. It goes roughly like this: 9/11 was horrific, its driving ideology was totalitarian, the totalitarians were Muslims, all Muslims follow a book they believe to be the immutable word of God, I don’t believe that, therefore all Muslims are idiots, and basically bastards. Idiot bastards moping around the Middle East in a paranoid funk just cos they lost their empire, and what a rubbish empire it was, too, by the way. Now, what is your balanced view of these primitive wife-beating idiotic bastards?

Like Hamza, Amis could only make his nonsense stand up with mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran. To risk a familiar example, it won’t do for Amis (or Hamza) to state flatly that the Koran exhorts Muslims to kill Jews without even asking whether this means all Jews or some particular group of Jews with whom the Muslims were fighting in the seventh century, or indeed, whether there are other verses that modify the message by deploring killing of any kind, or describing how ‘people of the book [Christians and Jews] shall have nothing to fear or regret’.

I claim no great knowledge on this subject – level-three SATs perhaps – but Amis couldn’t pass the test for morning playgroup. If my Shetland pony looks like a high-horse it’s only because Amis is trotting round the paddock on a chihuahua.

So how does Amis manage to move from condemning the horrors of suicide bombings to pouring scorn on anyone who can believe in paradise – effectively all Muslims? He muddles his terms. Even Hitchens concedes Amis wrongly conflates Islamism with Islam. By fudging, Amis adds the weight of his reaction against terrorism to his contempt for Muslims in general. Take ‘Islamism’. What does it actually mean?

For many it means ‘political Islam’. Amis calls it a ‘murderous ideology’, equating it with terrorism. Now look at the following statement: ‘The terrorist killings in New York, Madrid and London were wrong. They were indiscriminate, un-Islamic and based on ideas abstracted to the point of insanity.’ I was firmly told this by an ex-Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago. He was an Islamist. I strongly doubt he was murderous.

These concepts are more complex than Amis would have us believe. This lack of clarity allows him to group Muslims who stop teenagers shooting one another with a man who cheerfully saws the heads off Jews.

It’s not easy. Even ex-Islamists seem confused. Ed Husain – whose Hizb ut-Tahrir memoir The Islamist made him the summer’s top ram-raid sound-biter – condemns Islamism as ‘totalitarian’ but later allows for ‘moderate Islamists’. What sort of braincrash is a ‘moderate totalitarian’? I doubt it could even walk.

These distinctions matter because the way out of this mess (and it is a mess, fuelled by ignorance, stupidity, prejudice and weapons) is to clarify and discriminate rather than hurl abuse at anything that goes near a mosque.

I doubt many Muslims can be bothered with Amis. But he nurtures in his audience a corrosive prejudice against people they’ve never bothered to meet. It is culturally dim for us to form confident opinions about people based upon how they look and what we’ve heard they think. It is also against our interests. Nonsense abounds on the causes of terrorism but it is hard to argue that alienation doesn’t channel potential foot soldiers towards radicalisation. As one solitary Muslim asked him at the ICA, ‘Why such contempt for Muslims?’ Amis must have known something was up because he dropped his drawl and called the man ‘sir’. But he could hardly unspeak his views. And those views are certainly alienating.

With ignorance on his side, Amis can stare east through the salon window and convince us of a single advancing hoard. He’s clever. He might put it brilliantly. He might call it a ‘Meccalanche’ or an ‘Attaclysm’. But when he speaks, think ‘Hamza’.

Shame on us

JamieSW — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:34:42 +0000

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam – though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”.

The heated exchanges that followed were trivialised in the mainstream media as “a nasty literary punch-up”, “the talk of the literary world”, “a spat” between “two warring professors”, and the silence that followed seemed to confirm it as a passing tiff between two high-ranking members of the chattering class.

I see it differently. Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness. Only last week, the London Evening Standard felt able to sponsor a debate entitled: Is Islam good for London? Do another substitution here and imagine the reaction had Judaism been the subject. As Rabbi Pete Tobias noted on Comment is Free, the so-called debate was sinisterly reminiscent of the paper’s campaign a century ago to alert its readers to the “problem of the alien”, namely the eastern European Jews fleeing persecution who had found refuge in the capital. In this context, Rod Liddle’s contribution to proceedings – “Islamophobia? Count me in” – sounds neither brave, brash nor provocatively outrageous, merely racist. Those who claim that Islamophobia can’t be racist, because Islam is a religion not a race, are fooling themselves: religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white. Islamophobia is racist, and so is antisemitism.

And it is different for another reason. The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of War and Peace or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not.

This is all the more remarkable when you look closely at what Amis has been saying about Muslims and Islam. To the Dougary interview first. Eagleton drew particular attention to a passage that argued for collective punishment: “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

Amis sought to excuse the passage quoted above by pointing out that it was prefaced by the words “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community … (etc)’.” And he repeatedly highlighted the fact that the comments were spoken, not written, as Eagleton wrongly claimed (which, in some degree, allowed Amis to dodge the central charge of Islamophobia). In a letter to the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he explained, “It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment.” He had not “advocated” anti-Muslim measures, “merely adumbrated” them.

If, for some, the distinction was not quite clear, Amis expanded his defence in a live interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. He maintained that the target of his attack was Islamism, “an extreme ideology within a religion”. He was not, he stressed, attacking Islam itself or Muslims in general, though he ran into some difficulty when Snow reminded him of his observation on the alleged “extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture”, and of his reaction on seeing his six-year-old daughter’s toys being searched by airport security: “Oh yeah, and stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East” (itself further proof, if such were needed, of the racist nature of Islamophobia). Taken along with his assertion that “there are great problems in Islam”, did not these statements, Snow proposed, indicate that he was taking “scattergun” aim at all Muslims? Amis retorted: “I do not believe in any persecution of the Muslim community. I think that would be counterproductive.”

At which point, the question becomes unavoidable: is efficacy now to be the benchmark for persecutors? He also confessed to “little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then”, which was uncomfortably like a collusive wink to the audience: we all have our little prejudices, don’t we? Though he was forced to squirm a little, Amis refused to recant or apologise. His demeanour throughout was the ostentatious weariness of the unfairly traduced, and he called for an end to the whole dull business. “Can I ask him [Eagleton], in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?” he wrote in a letter to this newspaper.

Do we let the homophobe off the hook just because he tells his critics to shut up? Do we pass over the rantings of the antisemite just because he did not commit the poison to the page? To judge from the response of most liberal commentators, the defence seemed to work, and Amis’s wish to have a line drawn under the affair was granted. While Eagleton was attacked as a clapped-out marxist, Amis was commended, by a writer in the Observer, for “owning up – bravely, as it turned out – to what amounted to a revenge fantasy”. His “thought experiment” was the incautious but challenging musing of one of the most vivid and verbally energetic modern writers in English. In the Guardian, one writer concluded that although he was often irritating, Amis had raised important questions, while among the rhetorical questions asked by Professor John Sutherland was whether Eagleton’s – Eagleton’s! – position at Manchester University was tenable after labelling a colleague a bigot and a racist.

We can dispense with Amis’s polite fiction that he is talking about “Islamism”; there are just too many generalisations (“The impulse towards rational inquiry,” Amis wrote elsewhere, “is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male”), too many references to “them” and “us”. When he says, for example, “they” are gaining on “us” demographically, he is demonstrably not talking about “Islamists”. The danger of being overrun, outnumbered, outbred is a repugnant trope beloved of supremacists everywhere (it was used by the Evening Standard about “aliens” 100 years ago). It is, for example, horribly familiar to Arab Israelis, and to Irish Catholics (from whom Eagleton is descended). When Amis voices his fears of being overrun, he is, and he knows he is, perpetuating and enhancing the spectre of the other, and loading it with the potent imagery of swarming poverty, violence and ignorance.

At the Cheltenham literary festival, Amis treated his audience to a discussion on the relative value of Muslim and western states, the former being, in his estimation, less evolved than the latter. “I am just saying that some societies are more evolved than others,” he said. (Evolved is an interesting choice of word. In the Belgian Congo, the colonisers used to employ a system of rewarding colonised people who alienated themselves from indigenous society: they were raised to an officially designated category of évolués.) “There is no inoffensive way to put this,” Amis continued provocatively. “By evolved, I mean more civilised. We have more respect for civil society.”

This is not the time or place to debate the proposition or the definitions Amis employs, though I would say, in a general response to the generalised argument, that I have seen, at times, rather more respect for civil society, from how they treat their families and the elderly to strangers in the street, in Damascus, Ramallah and east Jerusalem than I have seen, at times, in London, New York and Paris. Equally, when he says, “Here in the west we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up”, it is hard not to think of the ghosts of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan who might take issue with him. No, here the salient point is that Amis, contrary to his assertions, is talking about Islam, not Islamism, Muslims, not Islamists.

It is one thing – and the right thing – to challenge at every turn antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, incitement to violence and hatred where it exists among Muslims, just as we should where it exists in the police, the church, the political parties, newspapers or anywhere else. But British Muslims I have spoken to now talk about feeling “deluged” by hostile comment. Hardly a day goes past when they are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism. Muslims who argue for Muslim schools are criticised by journalists who send their children to Christian or Jewish faith schools. Muslim women who choose to wear the niqab are upbraided by powerful politicians who claim to feel “intimidated”. Those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are antisemites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists. Muslims are under siege. Worried that if they speak out they will be accused of being quasi-Islamist, many have given up trying to engage in the debate over what Amis calls “the problems of Islam” (our old friend the “problem of the alien” again).

This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims.

Muslims bridle at the broad strokes by which they are depicted. Every time a writer or politician or policeman begins a sentence by saying “Muslims must …”, there is little recognition of the sheer variety of belief within Islam, or of the cultural diversity among Muslims, or of the everyday pragmatic reality of what it means in a secular age to believe in God and to try to live by that belief. In this respect Muslims are like anyone else. Some are devout, some are not at all, some are not very much, and some are devout sometimes. Some are sinners; they fall down and try to get up again. Some are hypocrites who fall down and pretend to be still on their feet. Many fail to live up to their religion’s, and their own, high expectations of themselves. Many have sex outside marriage, as many Catholics do. Some Muslims drink alcohol, as some Jews eat pork. A few, in common with a few Christians, think gay people should be murdered. Observant Muslims contest, dispute, accept and reject points of doctrine exactly as those from other faiths do. The Qur’an, as one Muslim put it to me, is not a program to be loaded and Muslims are not computers.

But almost worse than the ignoramus is the self-styled expert. After the attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers, Tony Blair liked to be seen carrying his copy of the Qur’an, as though this were evidence of a deep understanding. (Not that his Qur’an was much help when he was writing to Pakistan’s General Musharraf, at least according to Peter Stothard, observing him at work in Downing Street: “‘Dear Pervez …’ says the prime minister, as his pen glides along the top of a letter. ‘I’m never quite sure what name to use with Muslims,’ he says, looking up at his staff and down dubiously at his handiwork so far.” His staff suggested “General”.) I can remember a presenter on the Today programme begin her challenge to a Muslim activist with the words, “But the Qur’an says …” To which her interviewee retorted impatiently, “I’m sick of you people telling me what’s Islamic or not. This is my religion and you don’t know anything about it.”

Reading Amis’s letter to Alibhai-Brown hardly gives the impression that the author is an authority. Recalling that they once spent a convivial evening together, he said, “That night you revealed … that you were Shia and, as far as I understand it, the Shia minority speaks for the more dreamy and poetic face of Islam.” Is he perhaps confusing Shias with Sufis? The letter itself was a staggering exercise in condescension, its recipient praised as one of the good Muslims in the same way the Belgians kindly patted their évolués on the head. In a separate interview about his fictional reimagining of Mohammed Atta, who piloted the hijacked plane into the first of the twin towers, Amis acknowledged that he took “an enormous liberty in that I made him an apostate, rather than a religious maniac”. He said, “It would have bored me blind to look into the mind of someone who was fanatically religious. I make him a cynic who is there just for the killing, and I wanted to emphasise that, that’s it’s a secret no longer well-kept, that killing people is tremendously empowering and exciting.”

As a novelist, Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his characters, but the hijackers’ steps on the road to 9/11 repay investigation. Reducing the motivation of the enemy to bloodlust leads nowhere, as the experience of the British in Ireland proved. The result will be wrong and it will be cliche. It may be, given Amis’s spectacular powers, flamboyant, but that will only make it flamboyant cliche. Horrorism. Death cult. Thanatoid. Striking words but poor substitutes for understanding, reason and real knowledge. Go back to the start of this article. Look at the substitutions and then ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims.

Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis’s strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others? Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote on these pages: “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan’s formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one direction, the anger in another. I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines.

And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.